Portable hand held document scanners have proven to be very useful tools in certain situations. Their portability and ease in gathering information from various locations away from a users office or work place are two of the primary benefits of such devices.
A user may be on a business trip visiting various company sites. At each site the user may need to scan documents pertaining to one or several different projects which will be worked on back at the user's office or work place. Once back at the user's office or work place, the scanned documents can be uploaded to a host computer and then viewed or accessed through the appropriate application software.
With current portable hand held document scanners, retrieving a particular document from device memory to download to a host computer may require displaying numerous scanned documents in sequence until the desired document is found. This can be a very time consuming and inefficient process, especially if there are numerous documents held in device memory.
Also, if numerous drawings or schematics are scanned into the device that are similar in appearance, or the user is not familiar with the documents, or the documents are not inherently labeled to tell them apart, the user may experience difficulty in determining which document is which and the project with which each document is associated when back at the user's office or work place. In addition, someone other than the user who scanned the documents may download and use the documents. This person is in an even less knowledgeable position to sort out and identify each of the scanned documents.
There is thus a need in the art to annotate scanned documents with a description of the document, or background information about the document, at the time the document is being captured on a portable hand held document scanner. There is a need in the art to accomplish this annotation in a fast, efficient, and device resource conserving fashion. There is also a need in the art to be able to quickly review scanned documents held in device memory in order to identify the particular document or documents that are desired for purposes of uploading to a host computer or displaying on the portable hand held document scanner display.
It is thus apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved method or apparatus which solves these problems. The present invention meets these and other needs in the art.